The Bone Artists (6 page)

H
e jerked awake to Bon Jovi blaring into his pillow. Oliver flailed, grateful, for once, to be yanked out of his sleep. Out of dreams. A tall, dark shape had been watching him in his dreams, looming in the corner of his room, resolving into a human man but just the shadow of one. It watched him, it waited, getting closer to the bed whenever Oliver closed his eyes and opened them again.

But now he was awake and the only long shadow in the room came from the coat stand in the corner.

SHOT THROUGH THE HEART

It was Micah's ringtone. He scrambled for the phone with clumsy fingers, rubbing at his eyes, not believing them at first when he noticed the LED clock next to his bed read 3:26.

AND YOU'RE TO BLAME

He answered with a sigh, reasonably certain this was a butt dial and he'd just hear gross make-out noises on the other end. But no, it was his friend all right, and breathing hard into the receiver, so hard it distorted the sound, painfully loud to Oliver's half-asleep ear.

His friend's voice was frantic on the other end of the line. Oliver had only heard him that upset one other time, when they had climbed a nasty old chain-link fence in Bywater and Micah had sliced his palm open on a jagged link at the top. The cut clearly needed stitches—there had been blood soaking Micah's clothes, all down the front of his new Saints T-shirt. The blood was on Oliver, too, but somehow he remained calm, got Micah to pedal on his bike back through the neighborhood toward home. Then came Micah's grandmother and a trip to the hospital, and it was all fixed.

Oliver wasn't so sure any phone call or hospital could fix this. He could hear something sizzling and popping in the background, and his friend could barely breathe as he wheezed into the cell phone.

“Ollie? Ollie, oh shit, I'm so sorry,” he said. “I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry. . . .”

“Sorry? What do you mean? Slow down, man, what happened? Are you okay?”

Tears. Actual tears. This was the first time Micah had cried, no, not just cried,
sobbed
. There were sirens in the distance, growing louder over the sound of his friend's heaving, slobbery sobs into the phone.

“Calm down, okay? Calm down and tell me what happened. Do you need me to do something? Is there . . . Shit, Micah, just tell me how I can help!”

A long, shuddering breath. Another sob. A longer breath. The sirens were bearing down on him now, Oliver could tell, and that would mean soon Micah would have to go and deal with the police or the ambulance or whatever the hell that was.

“It's Diane,” he whispered. “She's going to be okay, I think . . . I think . . . I hope . . . Oh, God, oh Jesus, please Oliver, please! The other driver—I don't know. I don't know if they're okay. If they're here. I can't
see
anything. The hospital. I need a hospital.”

The line went dead.

“What!?” Oliver shrieked, slapping his own forehead. “No . . . no, no, no! Micah, you shithead. You ass! You can't just hang up, you can't do that.”

He called back. No response. He called again. Nothing. Then he called Sabrina, shaking, knowing he would not like at all what
he heard on the other end. But when she picked up there was a long, shuffling beat, the sound of bedsheets sliding around.

“Mmfffgh . . . He-hello?”

“Babe? Babe! Wake up. You have to get up now.” He could hear his voice going high and hoarse. Panicked. What the hell was he supposed to do? “There's been an accident,” he said, stumbling out of bed and searching the dark for his jeans. “I'm coming to pick you up.”

In the end, Oliver was too nervous to drive. His father woke up from the commotion, wrenching the keys out of Oliver's hands and forcing him to wait while he got decent enough to drive to Sabrina's and then the hospital.

Oliver huddled in the passenger seat, on the phone with Sabrina until they reached her house, and then he joined her in the back, listening to Nick Berkley calmly call hospitals until he found Micah's location.

It was a blur. A haze. The only constant was the steady sound of his dad's soothing voice and Sabrina's clammy hand curled up in his. He watched the back of his dad's head as they jogged through the hospital halls, searching, searching. . . . How could his dad be this collected? Would he ever get that way? Did adults just wake up one day with that skill to keep a level head when everything else was going to hell?

He hated the stark, white neon of the hospital and the sickly smell. He wanted to laugh, thinking of Micah clutching his hand when he had to get stitches, both of them telling jokes to try to keep Micah from freaking out at the sight of so much blood.

There were no jokes this time.

They found Micah in an empty waiting room, oddly calm as a whirlwind of activity went on down the hall in surgery. The doors were closed and nobody was let in, but from the way Micah stared intently, too intently, at the corridor, Oliver knew that something bad had happened. Sabrina broke away, racing to Micah's side, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking.

“Where is she?” she hissed, searching his face. “Where's Dee?”

“I couldn't do anything,” Micah murmured, his eyes hollow. A bandage was taped across his forehead, big enough to conceal a large gash. Bruises had already begun forming along his cheekbones. The faint smell of whiskey hung around Micah, growing stronger whenever he gave another deep breath. “The driver . . . They came out of nowhere. I couldn't stop. I wasn't even going that fast, he just . . . He just came out of nowhere.”

“Where. Is. She.”

Sabrina slapped him, not hard, but enough to make both Oliver and his dad reach for her, coaxing her away from Micah. But the blow stirred something in him. Light danced back into his eyes, focusing quickly and pinpointing on Sabrina.

“She's hurt,” Micah murmured, scrunching up his face. It looked like he was going to cry again any second. “She's hurt real bad.”

Real bad was obviously not the whole story. They got it out of him in bits and pieces, nurses running back and forth behind them in the background. Oliver didn't want to think about what that meant. Micah's face was ashen. He had seen something, something terrible.

And the alcohol on his breath . . . Oliver glanced toward the hall leading back toward the elevators, convinced the police would be showing up any second to question Micah.

The story came together slowly. They were driving back to Diane's house, maybe a little faster than normal. They had broken curfew, and Micah was worried about upsetting her family. Diane didn't care, she was having a good time. They were crossing the Causeway into the city and the driver came out of nowhere, gaining on him and then swerving, slamming into the driver's side door before Micah could react. The car veered and hit the right-side safety rail. They skidded and skidded but didn't go over into the water. A miracle, that. By the time the car stopped, Micah could hardly move. Airbag in his face. Car horns. Rubberneckers slowing down to see what had happened. To help. He was too dazed to get the car's license plate. To even remember a color.

And the worst part was, Diane was just silent. She had screamed, once, on impact, and then nothing.

At that, Sabrina dropped to the floor. Oliver knew what she was thinking because he was thinking it, too. He scooped her into his arms, holding her, letting her hot, constant tears wet the shoulder of his T-shirt. The linoleum bit into his tailbone but he let it go, just holding. Just sitting.

Then Sabrina's family began to arrive and one by one they started to guide her away, question her, and one by one they began to look at Micah like he was a cockroach. Like it was all his fault.

Oliver stood next to his father and next to Micah, none of them speaking. Sometimes Nick would pipe up to fill the air or
offer to grab everyone coffee. It felt like nobody was speaking English, like nobody was making sense. Where did you put your feet when the Earth wouldn't stop spinning? What did you say when a girl was dying down the hall?

A nurse had come into the waiting room. Sabrina and her family swarmed, understandably, and Oliver went to join them, pausing when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He'd forgotten all about it. He was so dazed he didn't even question who would be calling at that hour, and he didn't bother to study the display before accepting the text and staring down at it.

He couldn't hear what the nurse was saying. He didn't want to, didn't need to.

“My condolences,” it read, “—Briony.”

Down the hall, the elevator doors dinged. It took Oliver a moment to focus his eyes, dazed. Just like he thought—the officers were here, two of them, striding toward their huddled group, eyes grimly determined and fixed on Micah.

S
leep was a distant fantasy. Oliver couldn't imagine dropping into bed anyway, simultaneously wired and exhausted. There was no turning his brain off, not now, not when he was spending the rest of this miserable night at a police station.

He tore himself away from Sabrina and her family to ride with his dad over to the police station. The front of the building loomed high and pointed, the red brick facade reminding Oliver of an old schoolhouse. Traffic in and out at that hour was brisk, but the civilians being hauled in and out looked to be in varying states of drunkenness, some being taken out of the drunk tank, others going in.

Micah among them.

No, it was worse than that. He wasn't falling over himself or slurring his words, but he was just tipsy or tired enough to belong nowhere near a moving vehicle. And he had been in one and Diane had been with him.
Idiot.

“You said it,” Oliver's father said.

He had said that last thing aloud then.

Oliver shook his head, slumped over, shuffling into the station with his dad, knowing Micah was somewhere inside. “Maybe I should have stayed at the hospital.”

“Sabrina has family, Micah doesn't.”

“Yeah, even so . . . I don't know if he deserves us right now.”

“Your friends don't stop being your friends the second they screw up.”

Oliver nodded. “Sure. He said it was someone else, someone trying to run them off the road.” He thought of the text from Briony and shivered. Inside, the police station was freezing cold, the noisy AC unit jacked up to combat the humidity outside. “But I guess he would say that, given . . . Idiot.”

“Ollie—”

“No, Dad, this isn't the first time he's been a screw-up. Trust me on that one.”

A rumpled, coffee-stained officer directed them to the waiting area. He shrugged in response to their questions about Micah. No, he couldn't say when he would be out. No, they couldn't see him. Yes, a lawyer had been contacted for him. Yes, they were free to wait.

Oliver paced, his dad watching him march back and forth under the harsh lights.

“You have every right to be mad, what he did—”

“It's not just this. It's . . .” The lying, the grave robbing, and now
this
. “Diane is dead, Dad.”

“I know.”

“Because of
him
.”

“I know that, too.”

“And he might have been drunk. Jesus!” Oliver put the
might
in there for Micah's sake. Maybe they had been drinking earlier in the night and he'd spilled on himself. There could have been a bottle in the car that shattered in the wreck. Any number of
possibilities could be true, but the knot in Oliver's stomach told him none of them really were. He stopped pacing and turned to look at his father, chewing the inside of his cheek. “If someone is dead weight, how long do you hold on? What if they're dragging you down with them?”

Muffled voices down the hall cut short his father's response. Oliver twisted around, jogging past the water cooler and coffee dispenser to the reception desk. He spotted Micah's scruffy, dark head over the shoulder of a short, compact man in a trim suit. It was after five in the morning—how did anyone look that presentable at that hour?

Escorted by officers, Micah was smiling, chatting and chuckling with the guy in a suit, whose briefcase and smart spectacles broadcast
lawyer
loud and clear. Not just lawyer, but
pricy
lawyer. Oliver couldn't imagine where Micah had found the scratch to pay the retainer on someone like this.

“Ollie!” Micah perked up the second he saw him, his brows tenting over his glasses. “You didn't have to come here. I mean, I'm glad you did. It's good to have someone here.”

The lawyer snorted softly at that. The officers pulled away, leaving them in the waiting room while Oliver's father hovered in the background.

“I thought you were smoked,” Oliver said, relieved despite his misgivings. “But I knew you weren't drunk. That's not you. Sabrina's going to—I mean she's still pissed, yeah, but this wasn't your fault.”

Micah pursed his lips, glancing at his sneakers. “Look, there's no pretty way to put this, man, but—”

“But my client is smart enough not to comment further,” the
lawyer said tartly, narrowing his eyes at Micah. “Just like we discussed.”

“Right. Just like we discussed.” Micah shrugged as if to say,
what can you do?
and flashed Oliver a sheepish grin, scratching his whiskery chin. “You understand.”

Understand?
Understand?

Oliver flinched, opening and closing his mouth until the right words, or some of them, came to mind. “Hang on, are you saying you
were
drunk and you got in that car with Diane?”

“He's not saying anything,” the lawyer replied, taking Micah in hand and jerking him toward the desk. “You need to be processed out, Micah, and this conversation is over.”

“Micah—”

“It's going to turn out all right,” Micah said, giving another sheepish smile, one that ended swiftly. The lawyer manhandled him away, but Micah glanced over his shoulder, watching Oliver as he slid away. “Tell Sabrina I'm sorry, okay? Tell her I'll . . . tell her I'll make it up to her somehow.”